AI labs are buying and pulping rare books to scan them for training data
xuanalogue · x · 2026-07-27
The post highlights reporting that AI labs are buying books by the pallet, cutting spines off, scanning them, and pulping the originals. It says the ordering system is keyed to ISBNs and does not account for rarity, so some potentially last-copy books may be destroyed.
It also notes the copyright/fair-use angle behind the pipeline: a federal judge reportedly ruled the practice fair use because only one copy exists at a time after the originals are destroyed. The thread cites a report that Anthropic hired a former Google Books partnerships head to help obtain “all the books in the world.”
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